Reading the Treaty/te Tiriti through the lens of Civil Government

Dr. Samuel Carpenter is Research and Professional Teaching Fellow at Laidlaw College and scholar-in-residence at St John’s Theological College. His PhD focussed on early political thought in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a founding trustee of Karuwhā Trust (https://www.karuwha.org.nz/). He previously worked as an historian in the Wellington Treaty sector, for the Waitangi Tribunal, the Office of Treaty Settlements/Te Arawhiti, and the Crown Law Office.

This paper charts a middle course between the old, basically Pākehā orthodoxy that sovereignty was ceded by Māori in the treaty, making them individual citizens of an emergent colonial nation-state, and the newer orthodoxy that Māori never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown. Instead of sovereignty, the paper argues that government was main paradigm of the treaty. The main issue the treaty was designed to remedy was the absence of a civil authority (or government) that could maintain public order amongst Pākehā settlers but also across or between tribes and between tribes and settlers. Specific issues were external protection and internal regulation of Pākehā settlement, of major crimes, of the trade in land and goods, and of inter-tribal warfare. Internal tribal regulation of whenua and custom (tino rangatiratanga) would be left mainly intact. The paper primarily explores a cultural-linguistic reading of what the kāwanatanga or civil government in article one meant in British political tradition, with one eye at least on the
imperial context. It will then argue that this core concept and other accompanying symbols or concepts, including monarchy and law, constituted an emerging, hybrid political tradition during the 1830s-50s in New Zealand. This emerging tradition is supported by a reading of both English and Māori language texts of the treaty, and thus as an interpretive frame assists in reconciling the Treaty/te Tiriti.